Port Authority’s transformation begins long before move

A defined role, community awareness part of
goals

Look for a new Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority in 2009.
Though its officials have said it will be nearly a decade before the Port of Cleveland begins to leave downtown for docks further east and as much as 20 years before the move is complete, the Port Authority is transforming itself now. Its goals include making the Port Authority a more aggressive maritime operation and finding a comfortable role as an economic development organization.
The Port Authority last year hired five new employees, including a marketing director and a vice president who will be developing a real estate strategy, to help sharpen its image and raise its profile in the community. Those hires bring the Port Authority staff to 26.
In an interview, Port Authority president Adam Wasserman said he intends in the year ahead to give the community a better idea of what the Port Authority will be and what it can and cannot do.
Rather than people haphazardly approaching the public sector for its land, lets give the private sector extremely interesting, highly valuable opportunities, he said. We think we have support from the community, but we have to get better at it and start delivering.

The Eaton experience

Mr. Wasserman was reacting to a question about how the Port Authority can deflect efforts to push it to assist private development by selling Port Authority land at below-market prices, as almost happened last year when it was pressured to sell some of its land along the lakefront for a new Eaton Corp. headquarters. When Eaton chose a Beachwood location for its headquarters instead, fingers were pointed at the authority, most publicly by The Plain Dealer editorial page, for the failure to keep Eaton in downtown Cleveland.
While communities, especially Cleveland, have been under considerable pressure to subsidize the costs of private development through low-cost loans, publicly financed infrastructure improvements and tax abatements, Mr. Wasserman and the Port Authoritys board of directors realize they cannot afford to make those accommodations and still pay for the ports future.
The Port Authority tentatively has designated a site along the lake on Clevelands East Side as the home of new docks and cargo-handling operations to replace existing port facilities along the downtown waterfront. The new port would be on 200 acres created out of landfill and would cost as much as $1 billion.
The ports goals would fit into the city of Clevelands long-range lakefront plan that envisions the redevelopment of the current Port Authority docks  nearly 100 acres downtown  for commercial, residential and public use.
Roughly three-quarters of the cost of the new port would be paid by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, because the Corps would create the land for the new docks as a byproduct of its obligation to dredge the Cuyahoga River.

To market it will go

But the Port Authority must come up with the other $250 million, and it believes the only way it can is from the market-rate sale of downtown land that it owns or leases from the city of Cleveland.
Mr. Wasserman has hired Barbara Grano, formerly associate vice president of marketing and communications at J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College in Richmond, Va., to communicate those goals.
Beyond the move of the port and the redevelopment of the downtown land, outgoing Port Authority board chairman Michael Wager believes the Port Authority has an unrealized potential to have an impact on the development of the regions economy.
The port and its existing land can be the catalyst for the solutions that our city and our region seek, he told a City Club of Cleveland audience last Nov. 25.
Mr. Wagers term on the board expires Jan. 28. Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson appointed attorney Marc Krantz to fill the seat.
To unlock the potential of its land, the Port Authority hired Eric Johnson, former director of real estate for Charlotte, N.C. It will be Mr. Johnsons job to lay out a development plan that will make the 100 downtown acres attractive to developers  at the full market price of the land.

Development drive

Mr. Wasserman said he also believes the existing docks are underused and that worldwide maritime conditions offer the opportunity to expand the ports cargo operations immediately. He and Mr. Wager cite growing congestion of existing ports as well as the expansion of port facilities in Europe and Asia as signs that Clevelands docks can pick up their pace immediately.
Indeed, Mr. Wager speculated in a telephone conversation late last month that it may be necessary to augment the material gleaned from the Corps of Engineers dredging efforts in order to create the new port in eight to 15 years instead of 20 years.
We may have to figure out a way to fill up the (port site) more quickly, he said.
Beyond those specific maritime plans, the Port Authority is engaged in efforts to stimulate regional economic development by using its abilities as a finance organization to help redevelop two city neighborhoods and the area around Cleveland Hopkins International Airport.
In particular, Mr. Wasserman and Mr. Johnson will work with community and development groups to create and market a 1,000-acre international trade district in the St. Clair-Superior neighborhood just south of the planned port.
The Port Authority also is working on a plan to assist in redeveloping the Midtown neighborhood between downtown Cleveland and University Circle. Making the area attractive to biomedical businesses is a goal of both MidTown Cleveland Inc., the neighborhoods community development nonprofit, and BioEnterprise Corp., the nonprofit development group that seeks to attract medical and related businesses to the region.
Similarly, Mr. Wasserman and his staff have had conversations with the leaders of NASA Glenn Research Center and city airport executives about developing the area around Cleveland Hopkins International Airport as a center for aviation and aerospace businesses.